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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg B. who wrote (12004)	7/3/1998 1:34:00 PM
From: Jon Koplik	Respond to of 152472

To all - I had some thoughts along the line of "to all (currently) burned-out long-term holders of QCOM" -- and, this also has to do with the theme of which stocks trigger vigorous debate between the longs and the shorts. (Or, now that we have an easily accessed Internet, and websites like SI -- a forum like this one with a lot of posts). I was thinking about battles over a stock that reminded me of what is going on now with Qualcomm. One that comes to mind is Copytele. This was around late 1970's / early 1980's. (And, amazingly enough, the company is still around ! I just checked Hoover's Online hoovers.com and saw that after about 20 years, Copytele currently has annual revenues of $0.1 million, but is still in business, and even on NASDAQ). Copytele said (about 20 years ago) that they had a new, amazing flat screen technology for monitors. The stock went "through the roof." The shorts said "they have nothing (etc.)." It was pointed out that the founder of the company had family members on the company's payroll (for no apparent reason), all the usual stuff. But, this (to me) was not like any of many stupid rinky-dink NASDAQ hype jobs; it went on for several years. There was the usual massive short interest, occasional short squeezes, lack of ability to borrow the stock to sell it short, huge (totally unexplainable) moves in the stock price. The battle between the longs and the shorts was even the subject of a Barron's article titled (assuming I am remembering this right) "The Magnificent Obsession of Don McShane." (Don McShane (a big fan (then) of Copytele) at the time wrote a stock market newsletter) (I don't know if he is still doing it). Copytele's share price did eventually collapse. Anyway, the reason I bring all of this up is : people keep trying to tell QCOM shareholders that we are "blind to the facts" the way Copytele shareholders were, but this is absurd. Qualcomm is a real company. It does not have to hope that a whole bunch of "independent probability" (and low probability) events all occur in order to justify its share price. All QCOM needs (ignoring OmniTRACS, Eudora, Globalstar, and probably some other stuff) is for CDMA to continue to replace just some meaningful portion of technologically obsolete platforms like analog (and GSM and TDMA (?)). This is happening every day, literally. As someone said to me, even if one just gives up and assumes that QCOM is doomed to have a price to sales ratio of 1 indefinitely, the share price would still go up about 60% - 80% a year. As Maurice would say - end of rant. Jon.